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Peacehawks has moved to a new site. We took all the previous materials along, but we don't want to take a chance that we might lose any of you, so we're leaving this change of address here.

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and you can visit us there now - we'd love to hear from you and to see you  again!

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Jamie

LINES WRITTEN A FEW METRES ABOVE UNTERWASSERSTRASSE[i]: MEDITATING ON MEDIATING

By Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks

Introduction and Background

The end of the Cold War did not, as we then so fondly hoped, usher in an era of peace.  Although interstate wars may seem to have become relatively rare, intra-state conflict has become nearly constant and largely intractable.  Armed force alone is of little value in resolving these lower-level but deadly conflicts – and intrastate wars have since the early Nineties been characterized by sickening casualty tolls.[ii]  Alternate means of management and resolution of conflicts by non-violent methods have therefore been widely sought.  These have, in some cases, offered real hope for the mitigation and even the prevention of conflict.

A resultant interest in the tools of mediation and negotiation continues to grow.  The entire field which is generally referred to as alternate dispute resolution seems to present an attractive soft power tool box for the restoration and maintenance of peace. It has become an essential measure for containing, preventing and (hopefully) resolving conflict – non violently.

On 25 November 2014 Peacehawks  attended a conference on Peace Mediation, jointly sponsored by the German Foreign Office and, prominently among others, the Berlin-based Zentrum fuer Internationale Friedenseinsaetze (ZIF: Center for International Peace Operations).  The conference was held in the Europa Saal of the Federal Foreign Office on Unterwasserstrasse in Berlin.  The conference, as it developed, was not really about mediation itself, but rather about the questions of if, how and in what cases, Germany might have a third party role in conflict intervention. As was soon pointed out by several delegates, this question has been under discussion at least since the end of the Cold War.   Considered answers have ranged all the way from “Why not?” to “Of course!”   

Regarding the participants of this conference from the narrow ledge of my generation gave me an almost vertiginous feeling – they were mostly 40 or a bit, mostly German, and about half women.  And here they were facing up to a question, or a bundle of questions, which the graybeards of my service time in Germany had found unthinkable – when most of this audience were just in their teens.  Some people have indeed come a very long way in just one generation.  Nevertheless, I’d lived with these questions for a long time, and they were no longer up to me or even my generation.   So I slipped away to thinking about just what mediation really means, and how it ought to work – but has, in our life and times, so seldom done.

A BOOK WITH A VIEW: A REVIEW OF ROSE OF SARAJEVO, By Ayse Kulin

 

Kindle edition, published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

Originally published by Remzi Kitabevi, Istanbul, 1999

Reviewed for Peacehawks by Jamie Arbuckle

Introduction

The author describes  her book succinctly and accurately in her introduction:

This book tells the story of the heroic and honorable people who survived the horrendous war in Bosnia that took place from April 5, 1992 to February 26, 1996, during which Sarajevo was held under siege for 1,395 days, without regular electricity, communications or water.  Ten thousand six hundred  Bosniaks – of whom 1,600 were children – lost their lives.  Those who survived were pressured to accept the Dayton Agreement.   With this treaty, 51 per cent of Bosnia was left to Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the Serbs, who comprised only 34 percent of the population before the war, gained 49 per cent of the land. (location 31).

She has thus told us both what this book is: a vivid portrayal of the events in Yugoslavia (as it still was) in 1991 and 92, seen through the eyes of the Bosniak community; and what it is not, which is history.

This book may  be read and enjoyed for what it is: an entertaining and well-written novel.  It is best in depicting the slow motion horror of the unveiling  of the malevolence and cruelty of a very few men, who were determined  to wreck a country with no idea of what was  to replace it.  The effects of this nihilism on the lives of common people, and the difficulty of replacing a society which has been so thoughtlessly and deliberately wrecked, is something we need to  hear and not forget.

On the other hand, novels are fiction, and will vary in their usefulness as history. One who is genuinely interested in the history of these events will need to look elsewhere, because there are some gaps here. First, the importance of the relations between the Bosniaks and the Turks is in my view exaggerated, and my suspicions are fueled when I notice how this exaggeration seems to reflect a Turkish government policy about which I am also skeptical. Second, an entirely scurrilous attack on the UN and on one UN officer repeats the scapegoating of 20 years ago.  Neither of these apparent plot devices are essential to the story, and together they seriously undermine the credibility of this book.

INTO AFRICA – REALLY!

A review for Peacehawks of Sandpaper: A Story of Africa, by Angela Mackay.  2013.

- by Jamie Arbuckle

Angela Mackay has written a simply marvelous novel of Africa.  It is perhaps the best book I’ve read this  year, and it takes us truly into an Africa we think we know, or at least we think we know of: the post-colonial legacy of exploitation and neglect, and the  post-independence period of corruption and incompetence have combined to produce a dystopia characterized by poverty, ignorance and  protracted internal strife. Life is nasty, brutish and short, and we’ve heard it all before – we might even have been there.  But when you have laid this book down, you will at last know how little you knew.

Although the setting of this book may seem familiar, the cast is not, because they are all Africans – we  usually call them “local nationals”, don’t we? In fact, of 59 characters listed in the Dramatis Personae,  only four are not “locals.”

Above all, this (imaginary) African country is not a dystopia at all, and this is what may come as a surprise to many readers: here is a society as complex, as difficult to stereotype as our own – indeed, the major surprise here will be to see, to experience, how like us these people really are.

We tend, when we consider the peoples of these  “emerging nations” at all, to think of them as unfortunates,  somehow diminished by their misfortunes.  Our incredible great fortune in not having been born into a life of poverty, famine, neglect,  violence, has made us somehow superior to those less fortunate – a sort of geographic and historic inheritance. After reading this book, it will be difficult if not impossible for us ever to think that way again.  The Africans we meet on Angela’s pages will probably astonish us for their self-awareness, their sense of their own responsibilities for their society, their culture, their affairs.  Read especially carefully the chapter “Meeting of the House of Chiefs” (pp 129-139): an orderly and sensible debate,  highly effective negotiating techniques, a leader who is an effective mediator, a wise and mutually beneficial outcome to a complex, multi-issue process. They do not need the foreign legions of aid workers, peacekeepers, NGOs – their fate is theirs, and for better or worse, it is in their hands.  We may have indeed been there, done that – how could we have known so little?

I have mentioned that the cast is large, and the unfamiliar  names make it hard for us to keep track. A tip: there are nine in “Joseph’s family”,  and that family is nearly always at the center of the book. Take the time to learn them; every thing radiates out from or impacts them; follow them and you will follow the action.

“Write what you know” is a proven method, and Angela’s deep knowledge of and her love for Africa are among the strongest points of this highly readable book. Just open to any page, as I did, and you are there in Angela’s flowing descriptions:

A file of women walked home carrying water on their heads, the evening light picking out the enameled pots that bounced above the maize stalks; young boys hurried home with bundles of firewood strapped to the seats of wobbling bicycles. Cattle plodded across the dried river bed to water holes in the sand.

The mossy smell of night fell on him as an ice-clear moon and the flurry of the Milky Way floated across the southern sky.  Sometimes, far in the distance, he saw the one-eyed blaze of the night train carving across the land.  (page 41)

Fortunately for us, Angela goes beyond writing just what she knows, and writes authentically and convincingly of things she cannot have “known”. How to inspect a shipment of used weapons? Angela tells us in detail just how it is done:  “Swinging the weapons round, with his eye to the muzzle (he) could get a reflection of light from his thumbnail in the space where the bolt would fit  (page 78)”.  Just so, Ms. Mackay.

Later, we are taken inside the battle procedures and the preparations for an ambush (“Rain Fight”, pages 195-99), and it is as if straight out of Canadian Army Manual of Training (CAMT) 7-45: Infantry Section Leading and Platoon Tactics (1954), my bible for many years:

The killing group was in position at the ambush point, augmented stealthily during the night by the tracking teams …. In an L-shaped formation along the river bed, machine guns dominated the line of the advance … while most of the force lined the long arm of the river, row upon row, ready to roll over, pop up and fire at those trapped in the valley.  It was a classic approach …

I could have sworn that rain was, despite my helmet and cape, trickling down my back, as I lay there with them in the mud, waiting …

A co-reader of Sandpaper  has noted, especially in the House of the Chiefs, the typical male dominance. This is of course true, but one of the strengths of this book is that it is authentically descriptive, and avoids tiresome prescriptions. Moreover, there are 14 female characters here and at least three play vital roles in the events of the book:  Nani (who works for a local refugee NGO), Fran (a Canadian widow and restauranteur) and Magda (who in an incredible display of courage and resourcefulness, busts Joseph out of a prison in  which he is about to die).  Women matter greatly in this society.

Whatever Africa may have been for you, it will probably never be quite the same after you’ve read this  book. And, if you care at all, read it you must.

CAN CONGO BE SAVED FROM ITSELF?

Panel 3 of a Triptych for Peacehawks, by Jamie Arbuckle

Introduction

On 6 November, the Army of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with support from UN, Tanzanian and South African forces, defeated the rebel group M23. On 5 December, Nelson Mandela died.  In one month, then, we have been confronted with the worst and the best of sub-Saharan Africa.  Which is the true picture? Which represents the future of Africa? Are conflicts to be peacefully resolved, which we might call the Nelson Mandela Future Model, or are conflicts to be endlessly and brutally protracted, which we might call the Central African Future Model?  Is there hope, or do we face merely a grim preparation for more of the same, in Africa south of the Sahara?  

Is the Congo still at the heart of darkness, or is it the birthplace of the first great international human rights movement of the 20^th Century?[1] 

It does not simplify our understanding of the situation there that it is in fact both.

To address these questions, we need to assess several tributary influences:

1.     The colonial legacy, which was one of cruelty, disregard and dysfunction.

2.     We will review briefly the state of the game board in DRC.

3.     We will survey progress in human development in Africa as a region, with a view to gaining a better sense of what progress in DRC might mean – or might not.

UNO: WHAT TRIBE IS THAT?

Panel 2 of a triptych: A book review for Peacehawks of Hammarskjoeld: a Life, by Roger Lipsey, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2013.  738 pp; illus, footnotes, indexed, bibliography.

by Jamie Arbuckle

Introduction

There have of course been several books about Dag Hammarskjoeld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations.  The most authoritative was Sir Brian Urquhart’s Hammarskjoeld[1] first published in 1972; Urquhart combined immediacy – he was there – with scholarship. More recently (2011), there has been the extremely useful and readable work by Manuel Froehlich. [2]

Do we need another biography of Dag Hammarskjoeld?  As we wrote in the first panel of this triptych[3], we believe that there are some stories that are so important to us that they need to be retold afresh in each generation, and there is no redundancy in the retelling.  Each generation needs to hear, in  its own voice and in its own time, the vital stories of the times.  The past is not necessarily fate, but it is often prologue. And living in history is like map reading: if you know where you were and how you have gone, you should know where you are, and you can have a good idea where you are going. Updating the map from time to time can never be of no use.

And so, just over a half-century after his untimely death, another biography of Dag Hammarskjoeld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, should be a welcome addition to our knowledge toolkits. We therefore offer this review to our followers at Peacehawks.

This review will cover four points, the literary high ground, as it were, of this book and of the story it tells:

1.     The first area we will cover is to review the book as an excursus on  Markings[4];

2.     We will review the birth of peacekeeping operations, which occurred on Hammarskjoeld’s watch and under his ultimate responsibility;

3.     Hammarskjoeld more or less invented the role and the functions of the special representative  of the secretary-general; and

4.     Finally, Hammarskjoeld gave form and enduring substance to the role of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

WHAT AND HOW WE LEARN FROM HISTORY – OR ELSE

Panel 1 of a Triptych for Peacehawks, by Jamie Arbuckle 

 The knowledge-toolkit of a historically and politically aware citizen of this century will have several essential compartments – you won’t leave home without them. These may differ widely among us, depending on many personal and collective factors of our respective cultures and origins. In my tool kit, for example, there are five essential compartments, and they are: the American Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; the American Civil War; World War I and the Russian Revolution; and the Holocaust – how it started, and what it took to stop it. So my world, perhaps like yours, has been largely shaped by wars. That is perhaps less true of those younger than I, unless you found the Cold War a lot hotter than I – many Europeans certainly did.  But there is for me a sixth compartment which I suspect we nearly all share, and that one contains the creation and the workings of the United Nations, and the revolutionary effect the Organization has had on the conduct of international affairs.

History is a map, a map of our times and of those events which have shaped our journey. It is like navigation: know where you started and how you have gone, and you will know where you are and, most important, you will have a good idea where you are going – or else. As George Santyana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Hence my view that certain events will be so vital to our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live, that these stories need to be retold afresh in each generation, and there is no redundancy in the retelling.

History, if rigorously studied, can be a form of indirect experience. As Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, one of the foremost military historians of the 20th Century, described it,

 … there are two forms of practical experience, direct and indirect – and, … of the two, indirect experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider. Even in the most active career, … the scope and possibilities of direct experience are extremely limited. Direct experience is inherently too limited to form an adequate foundation either for theory or for application. … The greater value of indirect experience lies in its greater variety and extant. “History is universal experience” – the experience not of another, but of many others under manifold conditions.(1) 

So we need to study history as a form of indirect experience, in nature far broader than our own direct experience, which is so limited by our own perceptions and memory. Too often our direct experience is unduly influenced by fortuitous outcomes which may seem to favour us, but which in fact have done so almost by accident, as in a football game where the final score nowhere nearly accurately reflects the state of the play. And we need to hold what we have learned in an institutional, collective memory, otherwise it will be as Hegel said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

But we need to be careful with our history. The Duke of Wellington had little use for it: asked to assist in a history of the Battle of Waterloo, which would of course have cast him in an heroic mold, he declined contemptuously, saying. “One may as well write the history of a ball as of a battle.” (We’ve been to some balls like that.)

History is often willfully distorted, to establish and to support a position in a conflict, or to promote a cause. This is done by those wishing to initiate or to promote conflict, or to interfere in a peace process where they perceive conflict as more profitable to their side. We call this apocryphal history, and it has been the graveyard of peace in the Balkans for hundreds of years, and especially now in Kosovo, and perhaps yet again in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Legend has it that, late in the 14th Century, the Serbs fought the Ottoman soldiers on the Field of Blackbirds, which is in Kosovo. On that field the Serbs, under their prince, Lazar, were defeated,

And his army was destroyed with him, Of seven and seventy thousand soldiers. 
All was holy, all was honourable And the goodness of God was fulfilled. 

Rebecca West accepted this pretty much at face value, muddled the record still further with her own romanticism and concluded wearily that nobody, least of all herself, could “cast off this infatuation with sacrifice which had caused Kosovo,…”(2). So the die was cast, and 600 years later the Serbs could no more give up Kosovo than Texas could give up the Alamo. The big problem with this is that it didn’t quite happen that way, those six centuries ago.

The battle took place on 28 June 1389. While it is true that Lazar was killed in the battle, so was the Ottoman field commander. The Serb losses were enormous, and could not be replaced, while the equally grievous Ottoman losses probably could. However the outcome was so uncertain that the Orthodox Patriarch congratulated the Serbs on a victory. This was thought to have been because the Ottoman forces withdrew at the end of the day, even though the Serb survivors who remained on the field were no longer an effective force. “In fact”, as Misha Glenny points out, “Serbian power splintered and collapsed gradually over the next sixty years. The fortress of Belgrade did not fall under Ottoman control until the early sixteenth century",(3) over a century after the battle.

But the romanticizing of the legend was not to be stayed. The epic poem, “sung or recited by itinerant performers, … dwelt on the great themes of Serbia’s pre-Ottoman history. The stories about the Serbian defeat at the Battle of Kosovo Polje of 1389 became the cornerstone of modern Serbia’s national mythology”. The legends were resurrected to support the Serbs’ revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th Century, which were portrayed as “a revival” of an unending struggle,(4) as they were again at the end of the 20th Century. In 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds, Slobodan Milosevic infamously invoked the now-legendary Apocrypha deliberately to re-ignite conflict in Kosovo. Thus Susan Woodward would write (in 1995):

Kosovo, the center of medieval Serbia and Serbia’s historical identity as a nation, was a litmus test for Serbian nationalists. … domestic critics of Milosevic argued that he could not survive politically if he gave up Kosovo because the had built his career since 1987 defending Serbian rights to a Serbian state in the contest with Albanians over Kosovo.(5) 

We need to be very careful with our histories.

So this essay is intended to set the stage for our upcoming review of another life of Dag Hammarskjoeld, which we will be posting in the next few days. That will in turn be followed by a review of the situation in Congo since the apparent defeat of M 23, which is a continuum of a situation which in fact, in its modern form, arose during the Secretary-Generalship of Dag Hammarskjoeld (and which claimed his life), and which conflict has continued for over 50 years and unto this day.

Think of these three postings as our triptych, with the other two panels coming soon …

Endnotes

1. Liddell Hart, B.H., Strategy, 2nd Revised Edition, Praeger, New York, 1967, pp 23-4 
2. West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Penguin, 1982, pages 911 and 917. 
3. Glenny, Misha, The Ballkans 1804-1999, Granta Books, London, 1999, page 11. 
4. Glenny, op.cit. 
5. Woodward, Susan L., Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C, 1995, p 341.